Politicians Reaping Undeserved Credit

August 05, 1997|By E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group.

WASHINGTON — When House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich pronounced the budget deal reached last week as "a dream come true," you had to ask: Mr. Kasich, don't you have bigger things to dream about?

Perhaps Kasich deserves a break, his large enthusiasm being a refreshing departure from the usual Washington sourness. But President Clinton was no less expansive, calling this agreement "the achievement of a generation." The old song asked the right question: Is this all there is?

The deal itself is not as objectionable as the high-fiving, chest-thumping, boy-are-we-great triumphalism of Democratic and Republican politicians acting as if they had just won the NBA playoffs. Maybe the fact that Clinton was golfing with Michael Jordan when he learned of the agreement has some bearing on this. But the mood was more Dennis Rodman than Jordan. The claims of the bragging pols were vastly overstated, their preening as out of place as orange or purple hair.

This deal is a political classic. It's what happens in state legislatures all the time. When the economy gets hot and revenue pours in, Democrats point to good things the state could spend money on, Republicans to the tax cuts they could pass. If the political situation demands that the two parties reach agreement, the difference is split. Some money goes to programs, some to tax cuts. It's a perfectly reasonable compromise, but it's not rocket science and rarely requires political courage. It just works.

And this is a deal that just works. It happens that the federal budget was moving toward balance all by itself. ("The economy is the champion here," said Rep. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), a notoriously honest man.) Good times are eliminating a deficit we ran up in the 1980s when President Reagan and Congress pretended big tax cuts and big increases in defense spending wouldn't upset the fiscal order.

Clinton can claim credit for the return of fiscal sanity--but because of his 1993 budget, not this one. You could sense that Clinton felt a trifle guilty claiming the latest deal as the big deal: "The budget agreement that we announce today would not be possible had it not been for the tough vote taken in 1993 to set us on the right path." George Bush deserves some credit, too. The 1990 budget deal whose tax increases and spending cuts caused him such grief began closing the big hole. By contrast to 1990 or 1993, the 1997 deal was easy because Clinton and the Republicans had money to spread around.

Some of it in very good ways. For example, the $24 billion five-year program to get health insurance to 5 million children. It's the largest expansion of health coverage since Medicaid and Medicare. The final deal--thanks to tough negotiating by Clinton and Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)--requires states to use the new money to insure more kids, not toss it into the health pork barrel. If anything in this bill is historic, it's the Kidcare program.

The $500 per child tax credit is also a good idea for which both parties can claim legitimate parentage. Over the last 40 years, thanks in part to rising payroll taxes, the burden has shifted too much toward middle-income families with kids. The credit is a modest but useful step.

There's junk in this budget, too. The only good thing about the capital gains tax cut is that we may finally be spared the ponderous claims of supply-siders that the only thing holding back the American economy is that the "CapGains" rate is too high. But don't count on their silence. By next week, they'll have constructed new economic models to rationalize further tax cuts for people earning over $500,000 a year. This tax bill, which Citizens for Tax Justice finds to be heavily tilted toward the wealthy, ought to satisfy them. But it won't.

OK, OK, it's good the deficit is getting to zero, that this budget corrects some bad features of last year's welfare bill, that it gives families of modest incomes a little piece of the tax break. But this budget is a political contraption designed to let different kinds of politicians brag. If this is the arrival of a great dream and the achievement of a generation, we ought to pack it in.